Institute

Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

People

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science comprises scholars across all Departments and Research Groups, as well as an Administration team, IT Support, Research IT Group, and Research Coordination and Communications team.

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The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) engages with the research community and broader public, and is committed to open access.

This section provides access to published research results and electronic sources in the history of science. It is also a platform for sharing ongoing research projects that develop digital tools.

Researchers at the Institute benefit from an internal library service. The Institute’s research is also made accessible to the wider public through edited Feature Stories and the Mediathek’s audio and video content.

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The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science frequently shares news, including calls for papers and career opportunities. The Media & Press section highlights press releases and the Institute's appearances in national and global media. Public events—including colloquia, seminars, and workshops—are shown on the events overview.

Christoph Rosol

Research Scholar (Jan 2018-Dec 2019)

I studied history of science and media studies in Berlin and Toronto. Previously, I have been stipendiary of the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC in 2008 and the graduate program Media of History–History of Media (Erfurt, Weimar, Jena) from 2008 to 2011. In 2012 I became Predoctoral Fellow at the MPIWG and, later in the year, also research associate for The Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Currently I am part of the curatorial team of the follow-up project Technosphere.

As the MPIWG was and is a main cooperation partner for these two programs, my position in Dept. I specifically focuses on the development of a transdisciplinary Anthropocene Curriculum. This work at the intersection of the natural sciences, humanities, design, and arts allows me to be productively engaged with the numerous different facets of Anthropocene research while also studying it at the same time.

Meanwhile, my ongoing doctoral research deals with the (pre)history and epistemic foundations of General Circulation Models (GCMs), which are derived from numerical weather prediction techniques but have now evolved into a core component of so called Earth System Models. Based on a historiographic reframing of the objects, techniques and longue-durée ideals of rationally modeling atmospheric motion—i.e., the excessively hybrid configuration of empirical, theoretical and technological practices that stabilized an epistemic manifestation of the unrepresentable—I argue for a reconceptualization of the notions of "uncertainty" and "scientific revolution" that are common terms in the literature on this subject.

I am currently working on the analysis of climate records (specifically deep-sea sediment cores) and their operative role as data repository in constraining numerical experiments of paleoclimate reconstructions. By discussing an exemplary simulation of a possible pre-Quaternary analogue to current climatic change (the PETM) I am investigating the modes of representation, time evolution and non-linearity in modeling a climate history of the Earth.